In the past few years, state and local government revenues have been slowly improving. While challenges remain, offi cials have been taking steps to replenish rainy day funds and address long-term structural imbalances.

The Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program was created in 1976 and provides payments to counties and other local governments to offset losses in tax revenues due to the presence of substantial acreage of federal land in their jurisdictions.

Urge your members of Congress to enact a long-term legislative solution for continued revenue sharing payments to forest counties through the Secure Rural Schools (SRS) program. The SRS program expired in September 2015 and has not been reauthorized for FY 2016 or beyond. Forest counties received their last authorized SRS payments (FY 2015) in calendar year 2016 and the availability of future SRS payments remains in jeopardy.

Urge your members of Congress to support mandatory full funding for the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program. Unless Congress acts, counties will have received their last fully funded PILT disbursement in 2017. Without mandatory full funding, PILT will remain a discretionary program (subject to the annual appropriations process) and could fall back to pre-2008 funding levels, which would devastate local government service delivery in areas with significant federal land ownership.

Marketplace fairness legislation would level the playing field between online retailers and Main Street businesses by enabling state and local governments to collect already-existing sales and use taxes on online purchases.

To help county officials in their outreach to Congress on this issue in 2017, NACo has developed a new presentation, "Counties Urge Congress to Pass Remote Sales Tax Legislation." The presentation includes background on the remote sales tax issue, an overview of federal remote sales tax legislation and how counties can take action.

ACTION NEEDED:
Contact your House and Senate members and urge them to support legislation that would allow counties to enforce their existing sales tax laws regardless of whether a purchase is made in a store, online or through a catalog retailer.

NACo’s Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA) Profiles report the amount of revenue counties are not able to collect in each state, as well as the growth rate of that uncollected revenue from 2011 to 2013 and the critical services that this missing revenue could support.

In order to educate federal policymakers on issues around Medicaid and justice-involved individuals, NACo recently released a new report titled, "Medicaid Coverage and County Jails: Understanding Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Health Outcomes for Justice-Involved Individuals."

Hurricanes, wildfires, economic collapse, and other disasters can be natural or man-made, acute or long-term, foreseeable or unpredictable. Preparation for and recovery from such events requires both long-term planning and immediate action

The Resilient Counties Forum is an opportunity for county leaders to gain a better understanding of how they can help meet county disaster management, energy cultivation and protection, resource recycling and infrastructure financing goals. This forum is an opportunity for county leaders and the private sector to discuss successful resilience strategies, and create action plans for specific county resilience goals. The day will be split into two with presentations in the morning, and a “conversation café,” or round table discussion, in the afternoon. The full agenda is available online and in the app. THIS EVENT IS OPEN TO ALL ATTENDEES.

Counties across the nation are grappling with significant water challenges, including aging infrastructure and poor water quality. These challenges can have lasting impacts on the health of residents and economy of the county.

As part of the Stepping Up initiative, NACo has published a new report that outlines some of the challenges rural counties face when trying to reduce incarceration of people with mental illnesses. Jails across the nation serve an estimated 2 million people with serious mental illnesses each year.

NACo, the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center and the American Psychiatric Association Foundation (APAF) lead a national initiative to advance counties’ efforts to reduce the number of adults with mental and co-occurring substance use disorders in jails. These profiles show the resolutions of participating counties.